"The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded." ~ Vance Packard

State Secession? No, Individual Secession.

...American history has shown the path the secessionists are eventually to follow. For if they were to successfully secede from the Union and create a new "limited government" history will repeat itself.

Comments

"What is my advice to those that promote state secession? Abandon that cause for it is truly futile. Instead promote a different type of secession. A secession that the Federal Government will have much more trouble stopping than it would with state secession. A secession that creates no classes based on power.

Promote secession from all forms of government for individual secession from the State is the only way to obtain a truly free and just world." ~ Alex Perales

You have hit the nail squarely on the head, Alex Perales, congratulations. Secession is, has always been, and will forever be, an individual act.

Had to look that one up, Paul, I had never seen or heard the word Subsidiarity before.

"Subsidiarity: A Roman Catholic principle that says policy decisions should be made at the lowest level possible and the highest level necessary.
...
Subsidiarity has been in the political conversation since earlier this year, when it was used in connection with former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s policy statements. David Heim, the (Protestant) executive editor of Christian Century, raised a point of clarification about subsidiarity:

Most users of the term tend to forget one crucial element of the subsidiarity principle: larger organizations are always obligated to step in to coordinate or supplement the activities of smaller organizations when such action is necessary to protect human rights and serve the common good."

Ah, yes, the "common good". If I have to go along with an -ity, I think I'll just stick with individuality.

The "petition process" is necessary only because the individual members of an individual city, county or state have, at least tacitly[1], agreed to abide by the decisions of their representatives, who are supposed to do what the majority of their individual members tell them to do.

Same with the individual sovereign state known as the United States Government, seceding from the collective known as the United Nations, for example. It is supposed to do what the majority of individual member-states tell it to do.

From this we can hopefully see that "secession is, has always been, and will forever be, an individual act"; it all starts, and ends, with the individual.

Oh, and secession does not require the permission of the group one is seceding from, as some of you have stated, or inferred; it does, however, require some kind of majority in favor of secession, if one is a "member" of a group, such as a city, county, state or church, which have representatives, whose decisions they have, at least tacitly, agreed to abide by.

SECE'DE, v.i. [Etymology omitted] To withdraw from fellowship, communion or association; to separate ones's self; as, certain ministers seceded from the church of Scotland about the year 1733. ~ Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language [Emphasis added]
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[1] "What you do speaks so loud, that I cannot hear what you say." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"I like the idea of secession — for individuals and voluntary groups — but the idea that states are petitioning for secession has two really basic problems.

First, you don’t beg for the right to be free. Slaves didn’t go to their masters and ask permission to be free. The very fact of asking permission shows that you believe that the other person has the right to say, “No.” And if you believe someone else has the right to tell you that you can’t be free, you’re still a slave in your own mind.

Second, I don’t want my state government controlling me any more than I want a federal government controlling me. People who want state supremacy (of any kind) are misunderstanding the root problem. If the state where I lived now withdrew from the United States and otherwise maintained its current form of government, I’d be freer in some ways and less free in others. (I suspect the long-term direction would be populist, actually.) Overall, though, I would still be living at the whim of the majority of the people who happen to live in this territory. That’s no better off than today." ~ David McElroy